> I think this interpretation leaves something out -- the experience of WWI,
> which was interpreted by many people as indicating the complete bankruptcy
> of 19th-century European civilization and its "liberal" values. The
> Decline of the West and all that. While saying this, I do not mean to
> underemphasize the anti-Bolshevik nature of Fascism, but I think your
> reading is a little Communist-o-centric, to coin a very ugly word.
===================================
Conservative intellectuals didn't distinguish sharply between liberal and
socialist values, which they saw as bastard twins of the Enlightenment, each
subscribing in their own way to the principles of secularism and democracy
which were in conflict with those of Throne and Alter favoured by the right.
In any event, it was not the liberal parties whom conservatives feared, but the socialist ones. The liberal bourgeoisie had progressively aligned itself the conservative landed classes against the growing socialist working class movement as far back as 1848. Despite initial widespread nationalist support for the First World War within the working class of each of the belligerent countries, by 1917, European shop floors and trenches were in turmoil, and the revolutionary left was on the rise everywhere, leading strikes and mutinies, a process which was to culminate in the Russian Revolution and the establishment of strong Communist parties in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. The presence of these mass Marxist and social democratic workers parties, and the advent of the world wide Depression which seemed to confirm their analyses, dominated the cultural life of the interwar period, and forced intellectuals to take sides in the open class warfare. The Fascists were the shock troops of the ruling class right and the Communists were the shock troops of the working class left. The liberal centre, no less than the old conservative ruling parties, did not hold.
Of course, we know in which army Pound and Heidegger were enrolled.